I'm Out of Poems

If you’ve been reading my stuff lately, you’ve probably noticed a distinct lack of poetry here at Alexander Kaplan Poetry. There have been movie reviews, book reviews, philosophical musings, annotated poems, photographs, and more, but I haven’t published a poem since October of last year. Yeesh. I didn’t realize it had been so long.

The problem is it takes me a very, very long time to complete a poem: ten years of writing garbage and eleven years of writing not-garbage to come up with just forty. I remember when I first learned that Philip Larkin published three slim books of mature verse over thirty years. I immediately thought, “Yes. That’s what you do. Write slowly; write little; publish every decade.”

But “publish” is a funny word, isn’t it? I couldn’t get published. That’s why I’m on Substack.1

I should probably post new poems as I finish them, though I’m not thrilled by the idea. I prefer letting them stew in my skull for years and years, mumbling them to myself in the shower or grocery store or park, waiting to see if there are any final, minuscule changes to make. An example: in the third stanza of “The Horror! The Horror!” I originally wrote,

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Some dude gets doused by toxic waste
And turns to goop when hit by a sedan.

It must have been three years before I realized “hit” should be “struck.” I don’t want to put anything out there until I know it’s as good as I can make it, and I certainly don’t want to pull a Walt Whitman and spend my life putting out slightly revised versions of the same thing. The desire to have no more and no less than is needed is embedded deep in my personality: it’s why I’m a neat freak; it’s why I love formal verse; and it’s why, however irritated you are by the deluge of AI slop, you’re not as irritated as me. I sometimes daydream about a coronal mass ejection from the sun wiping out all electronics on earth. There are too many photographs, too many podcasts, too many videos. Wipe it clean. Start over.2

But I’ll change with the times. To bring up Larkin yet again, two lines of his seem permanently stuck in my brain:

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It seems, just now,
To be happening so very fast.

Of course, he was talking about environmental destruction, and I’m talking about, Christ, everything I guess. has consistently made the case that the future won’t look dramatically different than the past. I’m hesitant to agree with him in part because I so desperately want that to be true. I’ve had enough future shock for one lifetime, thank you very much. I don’t have much patience for those who romanticize the distant past—you don’t actually want to live the life of a medieval English peasant, no matter how grounded in nature their lives were—but it would be nice it if the world my children grow up in were not completely and utterly alien from the world I grew up in.

I’ve gotten off-topic. Forty poems over ten years is one poem every three months. I think I will probably post my poems as I complete them, under the “Peel Slowly and See” tab, and collect them into a book whenever I feel I have the correct amount.

And the poems from Better Homes & Gardens Revisited are all there, waiting to be read. They aren’t “discourse” on Donald Trump or Sydney Sweeney or Charlie Kirk, and they will be meaningful one, ten, or a hundred years from now. My most-read poem is “Alcoholism,” with 223 views. My least-read poems are “Plastic Deformation” and “Unblemished Objects,” with one (1) view each. These three poems are, to me, equally good. You should read them! Really, I shouldn’t have started posting my poetry until I started posting other, more popular stuff. Oh well.

Today is my one-year anniversary on Substack, and I’m going to post my poems as notes over the next forty days. I don’t want them to languish unread, but I also don’t want to spam people, and a putting them out there as notes you can scroll past every twelve months feels reasonable. Of course, I’ll continue to publish annotated poems and essays and anything else I feel like, which honestly, was just a way to get people to read my poetry, though it has been fun finally getting twenty years of ideas into the town square.3

I’m also going to turn on paid subscriptions. There are currently 408 people who follow my writing one way or another. That number amazes me. It also makes me think of a Simpsons episode in which Mr. Burns mocks Homer for getting down to 239 pounds. I imagine someone with 50,000 subscribers views my amazement about 408 subscribers the same way.

But also—fuck it, I’m not going to engage in performative, protective, self-deprecating humor. I am grateful for every single subscriber I have. And you know what? I did it on hard mode. (Cue Sid Vicious belting out “My Way.”) I could make a YouTube video on why the latest Marvel movie proves woke is dead and get a million views. I’d rather write about Tender Buttons and Wendy Cope and that dog..

I-forget-who once said about one percent of her subscribers were paid. If I can continue to grow and get one percent of my subscribers to become Medici-style patrons of the arts I would consider it a rousing success.

That said, there are a two reasons you shouldn’t become a paid subscriber:

1. All my writing is free and will remain free for the foreseeable future. I know we starving artists are supposed to be offended by the whole, “I’ll pay you in exposure” thing, but I’m not delusional. I’m a poet. I know hot takes about transient political events are what people want to read because that’s half of what I read.

2. And I’m not a starving artist. My wife has a good full-time job. I have a good part-time job. We’re doing well. I’m not clothed in rags, living in a leaky garret, writing poetry by candlelight.

But there are three reasons you should become a paid subscriber:

1. I have a part-time job because I can’t get a full-time job. I’m one of the many, many adjunct English instructors you hear about. I was supposed to teach a class last spring and my boss sent me a very apologetic email saying it didn’t make. I was supposed to teach two classes last fall and my boss sent me a much terser email saying they didn’t make either. I didn’t bother emailing him this semester. I would love to actually, you know, be a professor, but it’s never gonna happen. I don’t have a PhD because I had a nervous breakdown during grad school and dropped out. I can’t even get a full-time job at a community college. Sometimes I think I should just drive a bus.

2. If you become a paid subscriber I will send you a physical book (whether you want me to or not), and twenty or thirty years from now, when I’m rightfully regarded as the unparalleled poetic genius of our time, you’ll be able to sell it on whatever’s replaced eBay and put your kids through whatever’s replaced college.

3. It will heal my soul to know I’ve officially exchanged words for money.

To be unabashedly sincere, Substack has been an incredible addition to my life. I am someone who is stuck in the past to a degree that is both embarrassing and detrimental to my sanity, and moving forward with this writing project has helped me live in the present. I doubt anyone reading this can comprehend how sustaining that shift has been. I spent twenty-odd years writing for my hard-drive. The fact that anyone wants to read anything I’ve written is surreal.

Teenagers embarrass themselves so often because they’re always trying on new personalities like new clothes, hoping to figure out who they are. I don’t embarrass myself that way anymore. But it saddened me to realize that, though I’m past that adolescent pitfall, I now take very few risks in life. So I took a risk and exposed my writing and myself to other people. I’m glad I did.

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